The Gleaning Network
is now a legacy project
As of March 2026, the Gleaning Network is no longer hosted or funded, but individual gleaning groups continue to thrive across the country. After 14 years of building the gleaning movement across the UK, ‘gleaning’ is now a commonly understood word and activity among peers and we take that as a major win.
Whilst the Network may no longer be managed, we are keeping the toolkit alive to support new emerging groups to set up.
A brief history of the Gleaning Network
Gleaning is as old as agriculture. In modern times, between 2012-2020, Foodrise (formerly known as Feedback) ran the Gleaning Network across five regions in England: Sussex, Kent, the North West, East England (Cambs, Lincs, Essex, Norfolk and Suffolk) and West England (Gloucestershire, Worcestershire, Warwickshire).
In 2019, Foodrise recognised that community groups across the UK we better placed to understand the issues and needs of their local community, and so adapted the network model to begin training and funding a wide range of autonomous community groups, whilst connecting with and supporting already existing hubs. By 2021, the Gleaning Network had become a distributed network of independent gleaning hub with Foodrise stepping away from being at the centre and continuing to provide the Toolkit, resources and advice to support any new or existing group.
In 2025, Foodrise was awarded a grant by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) to deliver a gleaning consortium project with 6 delivery partners in the Gleaning Network to increase the amount of surplus food being redirected at farm level.
Gleaning isn’t just happening in the UK. More information about gleaning across the EU can be found here, and some of the rich history of gleaning in the USA can be found here.